I can't believe how fast summer has gone by! In just a couple weeks, I will be with my final year collaborating teacher to plan for the upcoming 2014-2015 school year. It's crazy to think that I haven't seen my residency family in a couple months, the 32 of us are like second family to each other and I'm really missing them. I can't wait to be back, but for the next two weeks, I'm going to enjoy summer. So far I've gone to Iowa for a family reunion, watched my boyfriend play in several softball tournaments, gone bridesmaid dress shopping for my brother-in-law's wedding, and in a week I will be going on a cruise to Cozumel, Grand Cayman, and Cayman Islands for 5 days. I'm going with a bunch of friends, including Ms. Petrillo, from the residency. I'm so excited because this is going to be my cruise and same with Melanie. Summer has been great so far, but I can't wait for what my final internship/school year has in store for me. I've been staying in touch with my final year collaborating teacher through texting and emails. I'm going to read two books before school starts in order to be knowledgeable during pre-planning with my CT (collaborating teacher). She uses the management style of Alfie Kohn, so my summer readings will be his book and The Morning Meeting Book. I'm excited to read them to expand my teaching philosophies and beliefs. Mrs. Humphrey (my collaborating teacher) is extremely organized and I'm so excited to learn from her because I too am organized. Just today she sent me an email and it's the entire school year calendar of which includes when there is no school, when students homework is passed out and when it is due, when students can come in for extra support on their homework, when reports are passed out, etc. I loved seeing this calendar because it is something I would love to do for my future classroom.
This week in class, Sara Hart and Sherridon Sweeney (teachers from Anthony Pizzo Elementary) came into our classroom and spoke to use about their collaborative inquiry that they have been researching for two years with Danielle Dennis. Through their inquiry they showed us examples in their classrooms, their findings, and that we should get the books below and practice changing our language from a fixed frame to a dynamic frame. A fixed frame is one in which students don't want to be risk takers and don't believe they can change. By changing our language, our classrooms will become student centers and our children will see the world as evolving and changing. Dynamic learners will be up for a challenge and not be afraid to take a risk and make mistakes. Recommended Text: Choice Words by Peter H. Johnson Opening Minds by Peter H. Johnson
This week in writing we made our writing center and discussed the last 6+1 trait, presentation, in class. This class went by in a blink of an eye and I must say it was my favorite class I've taken so far. The book that went along with this class was the most helpful resource I've used thus far in the residency program. I would recommend this book to any pre-service teacher that is wanting to learn how to teach writing.
Today was our last day of writing class and we all completed a worksheet that was an overview of the semester. The worksheet include: What is a word wall? How do you use one? Which classrooms should have them? ***A word wall is an ongoing, organized display of key words that provides visual reference for students throughout a unit of study of a term. Word walls can be used in a variety of ways, but in my CT's classroom, we use our word wall to display weekly vocabulary words, and I believe all classrooms should use a word wall because they are great for all subjects and grade levels. Students should always be expanding their vocabulary and a word wall is a great tool for that. Locate one piece of research/article which talks about teaching writing to elementary students. Attach the URL... http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/student-interactives/ Read Write Think has many printables that teachers use to help students organize writing, but they also have a great resource called Student Interactives. These interactives provide students with interactive organizational tools for various types of writing, including biographies, comparing and contrasting and even poetry. Using these interactives before writing can help students to organize their thoughts. Write at least 2 comments/responses from each trait that you want to use in your classroom. Ideas- 1. Your idea is really focused and you managed well. 2. I can picture that! Organization- 1. Good transitions! It helped me read through this with ease. 2. What a surprise ending! Word Choice- 1. Your words sparkle! 2. Your words paint a picture. Voice- 1. I can tell you feel strongly about this! 2. This must really matter to you! Sentence Fluency- 1. Your sentences begin in interesting and different ways. 2. Nice work with well-built sentences. Conventions- 1. Your punctuation supports the voice of your piece. 2. Great use of conventions for added effect. Make a list of at least 5 activities from your book that you will use in your classroom...Be specific as to what it is called and for which trait... 1. Pick the postcard- (Ideas) 2. The More Detail, The Better...- (Ideas) 3. Act It Out- (Voice) 4. End With A Noun- (Sentence Fluency) 5. Editing Symbols- (Conventions) Schoolhouse Rock and Grammaropolis are great videos to show in your classroom to teach children about conventions, conjunctions, verbs, nouns, etc. Your sitting in an unfamiliar room, with people from all walks of life. You have butterflies in your stomach because you don't know what to expect and your probably thinking to yourself...well actually your so nervous, excited, and anxious that your thoughts are all over the place. The first thing you should do is take a deep breath in and let it out. Look around that room once more, your fellow classmates may be strangers now, but guess what, those strangers will soon enough be your best friends, your support system, and your family.
The first few weeks in this program you all will do a lot of community building activities, this was my favorite time in the program. You get to learn all about you classmates, they get to know who you are, this time is fun and where relationships start to develop. I met my best friend in this program and guess what your professors (PRTs) are here for you and want you to succeed. These people you are surrounded by all care for you more than you will ever know. Halfway through your fall semester projects will start to accumulate, things will be thrown at you, and at times your plate is going to be too full. You may feel like you are never going to get through it. Between your inquiry, critical tasks, and story of professional learning, it's a lot, I've been there, you will break down and shed a few tears along this journey, but guess what...this program is here for you and wants you to succeed. Your professors are flexible, this program is flexible, and you MUST BE flexible. The syllabuses won't be correct after a week, some projects may be confusing, and things will stress you out. You need to know it won't be easy at all times, so ask questions. Chances are the questions you are having, all your classmates are wondering the same thing. Speak up and don't be afraid to clear up the grey areas. It will help you and make the work easier. This program is one of a kind and you must stay organized, be flexible, and ask questions if you are going to keep up. Buy a planner, make lists, and check things off, it makes you feel like you are getting somewhere. You are getting somewhere, your beliefs will change, and you will become a teacher. You must believe it. The final year residents "your bigs" are here for you. We know the emotional roller coaster you are going to be on, we know it gets hard, but we also know now it's worth it. Welcome to the UTRPP family!! Enjoy these next two years, it will fly by. -Final Year Resident Natasha a.k.a. Ms. Weber I can't believe it's the summer. My apartment complex is deserted and the University's campus is mostly just empty parking lots. It's weird to be here, but I wouldn't trade this schooling experience for the world. So this summer we are interning on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and have a writing class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The other two courses we are taking over the summer are ESOL 2 and measurements, which are online. After taking part in the summer semester for a week, I think I will like this schedule for the next month. I love going to internship for the full day because since I'm in a departmentalized classroom, my CT can teach the lesson to her AM class and I'm able to teach it to her PM class. It's great experience and I'm learning how to make each lesson my own after observing how she teaches it. I can add things she didn't mention or exclude ideas that didn't work. I have to say that this writing class, has to be my favorite class I've taken so far in the residency. There are a few reasons why I say this: 1. The book for this course is phenomenal! 2. Tracy and Sara are co-teaching the course and they work so well and feed off each other. 3. It's fun! It's been a week in this new course and I can't get my eyes unglued from this textbook that goes along with the course. It gives so many great activities to help students and presents them in an easily understandable fashion. The book is called 6+1 Traits of Writing and it was written by Ruth Culham. Throughout the book, her readers (being myself) will learn about the 6 traits that make up writing, which are: Ideas, Organization, Sentence Fluency, Word Choice, Voice, and Conventions. The plus one trait is presentation.
It is crazy to think how fast this semester has gone by and that we have 2 more weeks left until we start our FINAL year of college. This semester has had its ups and its downs. The workload has been overwhelming, but I'm trying to take it one assignment at a time. Balancing 5 college courses, on top of an internship that demands for you to design lessons and implement them, and adding seminar to the mix. In my seminar this semester we have been working on an inquiry and will be presenting our findings at an inquiry conference next week. It's nerve racking, but in the end everything will come together and turn out how it suppose to be. It's been an extremely stressful semester, but I've had tremendous support from my PRT, Tracy Wulf, my classmates, and my family. It's sad to say that my first year residency is about over, but I think I'm more than ready to call myself a final year resident.
Around this time of the semester, we need to start developing platforms for each of our courses. What a teaching platform is, is our beliefs on that subject and how we feel it should be taught. In my math course, we had to come up with a short summary of what we believe the role of an elementary school mathematics teacher should look like and this was my response: As a mathematics teacher for elementary school students, I want to make the content culturally relevant to students and as engaging as possible. My goal is to create problem solving problems that my students can relate to because if students can relate to the problem, they are more motivated to solve it. As a mathematics teacher, especially to elementary students, my goal is to be knowledgeable at multiple strategies for each concept being taught as well. Students need to learn multiple ways of going about to problem, so they can find one that best fits their learning style. This week was very exciting for me because I took something I learned in class, applied it to my planning process, then watched my lesson succeed. In Sara's class last week, a reading resource teacher from Anthony Pizzo Elementary School came in and taught us how to read trough an article and pick out what needs to be discussed during that reading. She showed how to develop a purpose, so students know why they are reading something, when to have children stop and picture something in their minds, when students are going to need to chunk words, when you will need to draw out something for students to understand, how to pause and ask questions in certain places in articles, and overall she taught us as we read the an article for the first time, to mark it up with things that come to our mind because our students will be wondering the same things. It was amazing to learn how to go through a text and mark it up with thoughts, words we might think our students will struggle with, parts we should pause to ask questions because I feel like often times teachers read a text all the way through with their students and the children don't understand half of what is being read. As teachers, we must take time to read the article before we read it to the students, mark where to stop, pose questions, go over unfamiliar words, etc.
On Friday of last week, my CT told me to look through next week's lesson plans and choose which one I wanted to teach. I chose to teach Tuesday's lesson, which was on figurative language. I took the lesson plan worksheet home with me to review what I would be teaching. I read the introduction of the lesson, the body of the lesson, and stopped and thought to myself, "There is no way my students will be able to learn figurative language if I teach it to them like this." The worksheet wanted me to ask my students, "What comes to mind when you think of figurative language? And knowing my students, they would have no clue what figurative language means because this was the first day of introducing this topic. After I posed that question, the plan said to read the book, Home Run by Robert Burleigh. It said to read the book straight through and then after I was done reading to pose the question, "What is your thinking about the figurative language in this book?" Again I would of had no responses because my students would not know what figurative language even is. So I decided to scratch the lesson plans my CT gave me. Going in Tuesday morning, I was extremely nervous to tell my CT that I decided not to do what this lesson wanted me to do. As I got to my internship, I walked up to my CT and said, "There is no way our students are going to grasp what figurative language is if I teach it to them how this lesson wants me to." I told her how I would like to take 30 minutes to really go into depth of what figurative language is. I told her how creating a foldable would be a great way to display types of figurative languages and she was so happy with my idea. Before class started, I designed a model of what the foldable would look like so I had an idea of how I wanted to teach it during the actual lesson. As my lesson began, I made a new foldable with my students so they could follow along with me. I taught them what figurative language was and the 8 most common types of figurative language. They learned about similes, metaphors, personification, onomatopoeia, clichés, alliteration, idioms and hyperboles. The examples I gave made the lesson fun and as students contributed their own examples, it was an informal way to assess if they were understanding the information. After we filled out our foldable, I then read the book Home Run by Robert Burleigh and the students loved using their foldable to determine what types of figurative language came up on each page. Hands were flying in the air to tell me that they had spotted a simile or found an example of personification. After the lesson was over, the students really felt like they understood figurative language and I felt great knowing that how I structured my lesson was the reason they were successful. This week in my internship the students were taking the district reading formative, while the students were taking the test my CT was given a test taking strategy observation form. I asked for one so I could observe as well instead of just walking around without a purpose. During the test I was able to practice what an actual teacher would do. On my observation form, I had to write the names of all the students testing in my classroom. The strategies I was looking for were if students were:
It was so fascinating to see which strategies were commonly used and which one students never used. After observing, I noticed almost every student went back into the text to locate or confirm answers, checked their answers, and eliminates wrong answers. Some strategies that students rarely used were circling key words in questions, reading the questions first, and tracking their thoughts and text coding throughout the articles they read. After observing this, it would be helpful as a teacher to go back and reteach these strategies, so students remember to use them during FCATs that are coming up. In Dr. Berson's socials studies class I learned about a great website that I definitely want to use if I teach fifth or sixth graders. The website is https://www.icivics.org and in class we actually played one of the games on this site. This resource would be great for teachers who struggle thinking of lesson plans for social studies and it always has great interactive games to teach students civics. In class, we played a game called Do I Have A Right? In this game each of us ran our own firm of lawyers who specialized in constitutional law. In the game, you have to decide whether potential clients "have a right", and if so, match them with the right lawyer. The more clients you serve the more cases you win, the faster your law firm will grow! It's a great way for students to learn the first ten amendments in a fun way. In Katie's class this week, we learned about standard algorithms, student-invented strategies for addition, and student-invented strategies for subtraction.
A standard algorithm is how we learned how to do addition and subtraction growing up. For example: 30 + 40 70 The student-invented strategies for addition are:
The student-invented strategies for subtraction are:
This upcoming week in my classroom, my 5th graders will be learning about figurative language through articles, poems, and more. Sara read a great book to us in Intermediate Literacy called, My Teacher Likes To Say by Denise Brennan-Nelson. This book is a great way for children to learn about idioms and clichés students may hear on a regular basis in the classroom. From "Do you have ants in your pants?" to "Stick together!" and "Great minds think alike," the students not only get to learn what each of these sayings mean, but the history behind the phrase as well. As a teacher, after reading this book to students, you could have them draw one of the idioms and write what it means underneath and hang them up around the room. I love to hang up student's work and the students can get creative drawing any of these clichés they hear.
This week in math, we took our first math content exam. I haven't taken an exam in about a year, so I was making flashcards, studying until the late hours of the night, and get butterflies in my stomach. I was nervous to take the exam and walking out of class, I didn't feel confident with how I did. During spring break I got an email on canvas that my score was posted. I was nervous opening up canvas, but I got a 98% and my hard work and studying paid off. Our exam was along the lines of what strategies do you teach children for addition, subtracting, reasoning strategies, and knowing the standards for mathematical practices. I was happy with my score, but I'm still nervous for our second exam at the end of the semester. In Dr. Hoppey's class this week we learned about a mnemonic called VIAGRA. As crazy as it sounds but it will help you think of differentiated instruction. It stands for: V- varied I- instruction A- across G- groups R- raising A- achievement We also learned about activities to help with differentiated instruction. As a teacher you can give your students a dinner menu, an activity in which students can use what appetizer they want to take part in, what entree they want to do, and what dessert they want to do. There will be different options for children to choose from under each menu section so they can show their learning in a variety of ways. Think-Tac-Toe is another strategy for differentiated instruction because students can choose what row or column of activities they want to do to show their learning as well. Every week I'm gathering more strategies and resources for my teaching portfolio and it feels good to |